Aleksei Novichkov
Senior Product Designer · currently in Belgrade, Serbia
Professional Summary
Senior Product Designer focused on productivity and collaboration software. I have 13 years of experience designing SaaS products. My work includes a task manager, CRM, and accounting software. I excel at designing tools people rely on every day. I enjoy simplifying complex features to create a clear, effective user experience.
I am also a frontend developer, which allows me to design solutions that are realistic to implement and polished in the browser. This enables seamless design handoff, close collaboration with engineers, and consistently high-quality UX in production.
Employment History
Product Designer at Buddy.ai
Jun 2022 – Apr 2025 (2 years 10 months)
Voice-based AI English tutor for kids, designed as an interactive, game-like experience.
Parental Experience
- Onboarding Optimization: I led a comprehensive redesign of the parental onboarding process, resulting in significant improvements in trial and purchase conversion rates.
- Compliance and Certification: Ensured COPPA compliance in the mobile app UI and helped obtain kidSAFE certification.
- Paywall Experimentation: Conducted extensive A/B testing on paywall designs, learning from both successful and unsuccessful tests.
- Complete Website Redesign: Completely redesigned the company website, aligning it with different audience segments (English as a foreign language, Early learning program, and Speech therapy). This new structure boosted traffic and enabled more effective marketing experiments.
Kids’ Experience
- Voice interaction engagement & clarity: I designed a prominent, playful “Magic of Voice” indicator that clearly signals listening states, reduces confusion about turn-taking, and makes voice input feel safe and inviting. To reinforce this behavior, we linked immediate rewards to spoken responses.
- Retention improvement: Integrated rewards into daily dialogues to encourage habitual use and improve short- and long-term retention.
Product Design Lead at Finolog
Mar 2016 – Jan 2022 (5 years 11 months)
Accounting platform for small businesses with automated bank imports, cash flow forecasting, and financial reporting.
Product Design
- As the sole designer in the early stages, I defined the product’s UX, UI, and visual language, and led it from an MVP to a mature SaaS tool.
- Planned and conducted multiple in-depth UX research studies. These insights shaped core product flows, reduced onboarding friction, and informed several roadmap cycles.
- Hired, mentored, and led a junior product designer, building Finolog’s first in-house design function.
- Redesigned key flows to help users reach their “a-ha moment” faster — particularly the journey from data aggregation to generating their first Cashflow report.
- User onboarding: Interviewed newly converted customers, identified their goals and early struggles, and created onboarding guides (using Intercom Product Tours and custom UI) to support activation and reduce support load.
- Created the initial help-center content and product explanations before a support team existed, giving users a reliable foundation for self-service onboarding.
Frontend Development
- Contributed hands-on as a frontend developer (Vue.js) for several product features during the early startup stage.
- Built and maintained the Finolog marketing website using Nuxt.
Communication & Marketing Design
- Owned visual direction across product and marketing.
- Supervised freelance designers and maintained visual consistency.
- Designed the main website, multiple promo pages, and visual communication materials.
- Helped launch numerous educational initiatives, including courses teaching financial accounting for small businesses; educational programs for financial consultants using Finolog.
Megaplan
Leading B2B SaaS platform in the Russian market for CRM, task, and project management used by small and mid-sized companies.
Lead Product Designer
Nov 2014 – Mar 2016 (1 year 5 months)
- I have completed the design of the new Megaplan mobile app, which the previous lead designer had started.
- Hired and mentored two designers at the company.
- Before leaving, I developed a design concept for Megaplan’s evolution, which became the basis for the service’s current design.
Product Designer
Jan 2012 – Nov 2014 (2 years 11 months)
Megaplan CRM redesign
- Redesigned core CRM modules (Clients, Deals), contributing to the launch of a modernized UI used by thousands of SMB teams.
- Simplified complex CRM workflows by reducing redundant settings, roles, and edge cases that had accumulated over years of feature growth.
- Collaborated closely with product managers and engineers to evolve the CRM while maintaining backward compatibility for existing customers.
Zettaplan task-manager (initially Megaplan 2)
- Contributed to the design of Zettaplan, a next-generation collaboration platform focused on tasks, projects, and contextual communication.
- Redesigned the core task experience multiple times, optimizing for high-frequency actions such as commenting, delegation, subtasks, mentions, and file sharing.
- Helped shape an Inbox-centric workflow, enabling users to interact with tasks, discussions, and notifications in a single, unified view.
- Designed a permission and access model based on company structure, including inheritance rules that balanced simplicity and privacy needs.
- Reduced a complex role system to three clear permission levels, lowering cognitive load for admins and end users.
- Worked on information architecture and navigation, including column-based layouts, tree views, and focus management between lists and detail views.
- Contributed to a reusable components library, improving UI consistency and development speed across the product.
- Partnered closely with engineers, frequently refining interactions, micro-UX details, and UI polish directly during implementation.
Details

Belgrade, Serbia
novichkov.alexey@gmail.com
Portfolio
LinkedIn
GitHub
Education
Voronezh State Technical University
Diploma in “Information Systems and Technologies”
2002–2007
Languages
English (Professional Working)
Russian (Native)
Skills
UI Design
User Experience Design
Prototiping: Figma, HTML/JS
Usability Testing
User Research
Frontent Development
Web Design